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D&D provides a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you get things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original take on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, starting a lineage of creatures known as celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to serve as warriors, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs once the god who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that ended seven decades prior to the beginning of the story. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the deities died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became creatures that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the place.

The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {